Any Port in a Storm
by karebear
Summary: Kaidan Alenko's been to the farthest reaches of deep space and fallen, hard, back to Earth. Janey Shepard will take any escape that can pull her up from rock bottom. Wind, waves, and Red Sand crash them into each other, for just long enough. Earthborn Shepard/Kaidan Mass Effect prequel.


**Warning:** Herein lie adult themes, language, sex (including sex involving teenagers and implied-though-not-detailed noncon/dubcon), drugs, violence, weapons, nonlinear narrative structure, fun with verb tenses, and blatant time skips, and a few slightly-less-than-subtle nods to "The Wire" Proceed at Own Risk!

* * *

"_Dear Lord, be good to me, the sea is so wide and my boat is so small."  
_- traditional

"'sa matter, pretty boy?"

Kaidan whirls around, hardened eyes narrowed as he tracks the source of the intrusion into his solitude. _The mouth of a dark alley at night. The hell were you thinking, Alenko?_

He lets himself light up a pulse of biotic energy, all bright blue light and potential. It's a rush, a thrumming vibration through his blood. He watches the dark shadows dart and dance over the brick wall. "Don't mess with me," he chokes out. His voice shakes and stutters, and his heart sinks. He scrambles for some hint of the kind of fearless certainty that had led him to throw himself in front of a turian merc with a cruel streak a mile wide. It doesn't work. The memory only makes him shiver, a result of more than the icy biting wind of Vancouver in February.

He hears a laugh: a cold, choking sound. He glances up, following the source of the sound. A skinny kid, younger than he is, dangles from the fire escape above his head, grinning. It isn't a friendly smile. It's a feral predator's grin. A Vyrnnus grin.

Bright eyes glint in the darkness. "So what, you're strung out on sand? I'm supposed to be impressed?"

Kaidan doesn't think. He throws all that collected potential outward, an invisible push that slams into the rough brick wall and rattles the rickety metal ladder. Flakes of crumbly dry mortar and old dirt rain down. "It's not sand," he insists.

His possible attacker only laughs harder, jumping down to land at his feet. This close, under the pooling streetlight, Kaidan notices for the first time that the body has noticeable _curves_, even covered almost entirely by a too-large ski jacket that has seen at least a half dozen better lifetimes. He doesn't miss the hastily sewn patch of red highlighting the upper right arm either. The girl's tangled dark hair is tied back with a knotted strip of cloth in the same bright, bloody color.

His heart beats rapidly under his ribcage. He's been gone for years, but he'd grown up in this town long enough to know who the Reds are. He'd gotten most of his education in the city schools, watching more and more of his classmates pulled their way before he'd been recruited by the only other larger gang in town: the Earth Systems Alliance.

"So you're one of them eezo freaks, huh?"

Kaidan shrugs. Once upon a time, he would have gotten offended - and responded to that offense with a hotheaded, wild reaction. Now, he simply accepts it as truth. He flexes his gloved fingers, cleching and unclenching a fist, and doesn't respond. The girl - the _gang member_ - watches him, and laughs.

He feels a familiar wave of energy crashing over and through him, tickling at the edges of his brain; just before he slams hard into a precarious stack of nearby crates. Rusty nails jut out from splintered wood and scrape against his flesh, drawing blood and pain. He throws up a barrier without thinking, breathing heavily. His eyes track the girl, who advances on him, eyes bright with power. He can feel it, radiating from her, and she's _strong_.

"Me too," she says simply, casually.

Kaidan picks himself up and tries to calm the pounding in his head. The sparks of light around the girl suddenly go out, plunging the alley into deeper darkness.

"You should go home," she spits harshly. "Don't you know these streets are dangerous?"

Kaidan crosses his arms over his chests and stares the girl down and fights both the memories brought up by the question and the stupid chivalrous urge to help when nobody ever asked him to that had gotten him this deep in the first place.

_"Look: chances are good we can call it self-defense."_

It was self-defense_,_ Kaidan had thought immediately, barely glancing at the lawyer, but he hadn't said anything. He'd simply squirmed in the uncomfortable chair and stared sullenly at the shiny table. His image, warped and distorted by the embedded grain of the shellacked imitation wood, had stared back at him.

"The turian pulled the knife first, didn't he?" the lawyer pressed, ignorant of or ignoring his charge's apathy. Kaidan had shrugged, knowing that the lawyer's datapad held all the files and reports that would matter. He knew the answer to the question, of course. He couldn't forget anything about that flashpoint moment out on Jump Zero ("Gagarin Station," according to all the files. The words had tasted strange and wrong on his tongue, and he'd immediately appreciated that: everything about that place and what happened there was wrong).

It didn't even take effort to find himself back there again, fighting the urge to put his head down on the table and just fall asleep... if he even _could_. Brain camp was exhaustion, constantly warring with pain, a raw agony that tangled up behind his eyelids, intense and all-consuming, although he'd still be able to feel it tracing a path through every individual neuron firing in his brain, each one exploding like a firework.

That day in the mess hall, he'd bitten down hard on his lower lip in an attempt to stop himself from outright crying, even knowing he'd be far from alone in doing so. He can still taste the blood on his lip, the salt of the few tears he hadn't been capable of stopping, an involuntary bodily reaction to physical and mental stress pushed to, and beyond, the limit of a still maturing human's endurance.

Rahna had been sitting across from him, the way she usually did. She'd glanced up and frowned, eyes dark with worry and exhaustion of her own. Kaidan had shaken his head and attempted a smile, though the movement had made him flinch and instantly undone the effort.

Above them, Vyrnnus stood watching without betraying the slightest hint of compassion. "Do it again," the turian ordered.

Rahna drew in a ragged breath, and this time Kaidan felt the sharp, familiar bite of concern, like a punch to the gut. He ignored the pounding, crashing waves of pain that screamed at him in warning and forced himself to breathe, to find that rock-steady core of calm that would allow him to concentrate enough to harness the potential the mercenary demanded. He could feel the pulses of biotic energy beginning to gather around him, like sparks of static electricity, and he'd sent them casting outward, seeking a target, searching... it _hurt_, and he'd pulled back without meaning to, like a child recoiling from a hot stove. His breathing echoed back heavy in his ears, and he sagged back into the chair. His eyes flickered nervously toward Vyrnnus as he waited for chastisement.

And then he'd heard Rahna's sharp gasp, and a choking scream. There was a sickening cracking sound, and his heart hammered in his chest as his friend whimpered; a pathetic, mewling sound that didn't belong in any scene involving human beings. Her eyes were glassy and fever-bright. And Vyrnnus _wouldn't let go of her_: his strong, three-fingered claw clamped tight, twisting her shattered arm.

He'd thrown her away from him abruptly, without warning, and Rahna collapsed hard on the smooth-tiled floor.

"Do it again," the turian snarled.

"Leave her alone!" Kaidan screamed, leaping over the table and hammering against the alien's rock-hard chest with useless fists. He'd shouted and kicked in a wild frenzy, without thinking. Pain flared through his body, along with the dim awareness that Vyrnnus - bigger, stronger, military-trained with a barely-kept-in-check hatred of humans Vyrnnus - was retaliating, and not with the desperate unthought violence of Kaidan's efforts either, but with calculated, targeted blows. He was not defending himself. He didn't have to. He was simply punishing this stupid boy from an inferior species for having the audacity to attack him.

Kaidan crumpled as the turian casually punched him in the stomach, expelling the air from his lungs. He'd coughed, struggling to right himself, scrambling backward until he felt the scrape of sharp and heavy claws against his flesh. He'd twisted and pulled away, but couldn't break out of the turian's grip.

He'd still refused to look away. He'd swallowed his fear and stared Vyrnnus down, looking directly into his unblinking, reptilian eyes. The stalemate lasted until, with the same smooth, careful precision of all his movements, Vyrnnus drew the knife from its sheath at his leg. A military-issue talon blade; glinting with the reflected light from the mess hall's bright overhead fluorescents. Kaidan wrestled out of the turian's grip, stumbling backward, catching himself painfully against the table before he fell. He hadn't breathed, hadn't moved, except to steal the briefest glance at Rahna, who stared up at the confrontation, still whimpering.

Vyrnnus clutched the vicious knife in a tight but flexible grip that made it clear he knew exactly how to use the weapon, and advanced on Kaidan. His mandibles flared, betraying the only _possible _hint of emotion that Kaidan could read, but he'd said nothing: no threat, no taunt, no warning or command. Just the knife, and the unnaturally loud beating of Kaidan's heart echoing back in his ears.

Kaidan knows that he hadn't thought. He hadn't _tried_. He'd simply thrown a violent pulse of telekinetic energy directly at the turian mercenary, forcing him _away_, buying himself time to breathe, time to escape, time to plan, time to protect Rahna from the vengeance that was surely coming. In this few heartbeats worth of time he'd managed to pull himself to his feet, clutching tightly to the table to steady himself. And as he'd cast his glance in the direction he'd aimed his biotic throw, he was hit with the sudden, crystal-clear realization that there was no retaliatory attack coming. Vyrnnus was still down. He didn't know anything about turian biology, but he understood that the man's head and neck were twisted at an angle that shouldn't have been possible. The mercenary's eyes were no longer bright with violent intent, but dark and only dimming further. Blue blood and spittle gurgled from his lips and he attempted to gasp for air but managed only choking coughs.

Kaidan knelt down next to the turian, but made no move to touch him. He breathed in shallow, nervous gasps, feeling empty. He'd thought Vyrnnus had met his eyes for half a heartbeat, but he will never be sure he wasn't imagining that.

He'd watched the turian's eyes slip closed, his body go limp.

There was a sudden loud, frenetic commotion swirling through the mess hall that somehow never seemed to touch him, and he'd known then, in a distant, hazy kind of way, that something _very bad_ had just happened. Men - human and turian - in military uniforms rushed past him, shouting and flailing. He'd recognized a few scattered pieces of medical equipment, but couldn't comprehend the reason for their presence, not then, not yet.

He'd searched for Rahna but couldn't find her in the crowd, and that suddenly _mattered_. Someone's hand had wrapped around his arm, a gentle but firm touch. People asked him questions, but he couldn't find the words they wanted. He'd felt an insistent stabbing pinch, a needle sliding into his arm, and the world blurred even more completely.

He'd woken up in the station's med bay, where the doctor frowned and tsked at the bruises and deep scrapes left behind by the turian's beating, but said nothing.

And in a battered conference room on Earth a month later, a public defender heaved a deep and tired sigh and drummed his fingers on the tabletop impatiently. "It _was_ self-defense, wasn't it, boy?"

Standing here in the darkened alleyway with a kid in gang colors warning him of _danger_, Kaidan is acutely aware that he never had answered the question.

_"Go home_," the girl, the self-described eezo freak, demands, though she still stands unmoving, refusing for whatever reason to come closer to him.

"Can't," Kaidan tells her, simply.

For years, the only home he'd had was his bunk at Brain Camp. He's lived other places since: a childhood bedroom full of outgrown toys and uncomfortable silences; a hospital bed (more than one); even a jail cell for a few nights. He gets shuffled around because no one knows what the hell to do with him. In the beginning there were a lot of loud voices arguing over him: doctors, lawyers, his mother and father, a frazzled young woman in a business suit who said she was his _guardian ad litem_. She'd never explained what that meant, so he had to look it up on the 'net, and anyway, she'd only carried on only one distracted conversation with him before he never saw her again.

He'd been in court, sat in steel-and-glass office buildings listening to social workers and policemen tell him over and over again where he _couldn't_ go. They put him on meds to kill his biotics. He only pretends to take them, but he doesn't use his power anyway. Tonight, just now, was the first time since he's been back on Earth.

They threatened brain surgery, wanting to remove his implant: he'd sat on his courtroom bench and listened in a distracted haze as doctors reiterated the fact that doing so would have an almost certain probability of killing him, or leaving him a vegetable for the rest of his life. Soldiers in perfect blue uniforms argued that he ought to spend that life locked up instead. He'd caused a diplomatic incident with the first alien race humanity has ever contacted. He figures he'd just been born a few years too late: during the war, accidentally killing a turian probably would've gotten him a medal.

"You're not planning to sleep out here, are you? You'll freeze to death."

"I'm not planning anything," he answers.

The girl cracks a smile, waves a beckoning hand. Her enthusiasm is guarded, but somehow still it makes her seem even younger, highlights the childhood these streets must've long since burned away.

"C'mon, freak."

"Kaidan."

"What."

"My name. It's Kaidan. Kaidan Alenko."

"Holy shit. That was you." She swipes her palm against a datapad she pulls from some concealed pocket to show him a video loop of his trial. The commentators weighing in insist he's a danger, a menace to society. Kaidan stuffs his bare hands into tight fists and crams them into his jacket pockets and thinks: so much for sealed records.

He nods, unnecessarily, and the girl gives a soft grunt of acknowledgement and raises an eyebrow, impressed. Kaidan feels a swelling pride in his chest as he accepts her newfound appreciation. He tells himself she appreciates him because he's a criminal, a killer. He wonders what it means that he can't find it in himself to make that matter.

"My name's Shepard," the girl calls over her shoulder, vaulting and scrambling over fire escapes and through darkened warehouses. Kaidan follows her, his eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness of this unfamiliar world nestled in the city he'd grown up in and hasn't seen for years. "Jane Shepard. Janey, really. That's what everybody calls me."

Janey. It sounds like the kind of name that belongs on a little girl in a sundress, playing with dolls and teddy bears at some church social behind a white picket fence. He wonders if, a long time ago, she'd been that girl, if she has parents somewhere who had wanted that girl, and got disappointment instead.

He follows her to an empty office at the back of an abandoned warehouse, sprayed with gang tags, and falls asleep instantly when she kicks an old army sleeping bag in his direction.

Kaidan wakes up, blinks his eyes open, and lets his vision adjust to the perpetual twilight of the windowless room. The air is still, coated in choking dust: he can watch it settle in thick clouds on the floor. He reaches out and swipes his finger lazily through one of the piles as he tries not to listen to the sounds coming from the corner of the room. The too-familiar, too-predictable cries and curses force his way into his consciousness no matter how much effort he puts into pretending to ignore it. He rolls onto his side so that there is nothing to see but the dark wall, and pulls his blanket over his head. His head thrums with a rhythmic drumming; the prelude to the all-out assault of an oncoming migraine. He knows how to tough it out: the same way he pushed through the pain on Jump Zero, the same way Janey ignores it when the boss does worse things to her than Vyrnnus had ever done.

After almost four years, _doing nothing_ _about it_ has not gotten any easier. Guilt and violent anger churn in the pit of his stomach. He can feel the weight of the heavy pistol in his hand, although he doesn't remember removing the gun from its place just within reach stuffed under a pillow. The weapon feels solid and warm in his sweaty grip. It's Janey's gun. She'd taught him how to fire it, but it still feels awkward at the same time as clinging to it makes him feel better. He turns it over in his hands and focuses on breathing, concentrating enough to quash the thoughtless animal instinct to fight back that is the reason everybody thinks he's dangerous: more dangerous than the gun he's holding, more dangerous than the gang members across the room (and he still holds himself as separate from them, even after all this time, even if only in his mind).

He'd tried, just once, to protect Janey the same way he'd failed to protect Rahna, and she'd pretended to ignore his existence for over a week, and told him to stay out of her business when she did come back. He should stop trying to help people. It only sends them running.

He doesn't hear voices anymore; just creaking and shifting, quiet movement, and snoring. He wonders if that should make him feel better or worse. He flips onto his back and stares and the ceiling and tries to pretend that he doesn't feel anything at all.

Of course he knows Janey was used to surviving in this hellish environment for a long time before she ever met him, and she refuses to let him jeopardize that, coming from his different world where money buys the friendship of the police rather than their enmity. She swears she'll get her revenge one day, but not by doing something _stupid_ and getting herself killed. Kaidan knows this is not an exaggerated fear. He's seen - no, no point in lying now - he's _helped_ dump bodies where the cops will never find them. There is more blood on his hands than just Vyrnnus, now. He remembers nothing good about police stations and courtrooms, and knows that proper legal channels are more likely to laugh than help with any report of victimization he attempts to make: they won't go after the head of the largest gang in the city for any but their own reasons. They'd probably arrest him, or Jane, if either of them walked into the precinct office. Kaidan won't be the reason she goes to prison, even if she's already been, multiple times ("baby jail," she'd told him when he asked. "It doesn't count.").

He remembers his bleak stretch of less than a week in that juvenile detention center: alone, unbooked and uncharged, stashed there less because of guilt than because there was no better idea of where he belonged. Yet still, his father had been furious, and his mother had cried, and even if he'd known the exact selection of words that could explain or apologize for his behavior (even though he isn't even sure he _should_ apologize), he'd been keenly aware that no one really wanted to listen to him anyway. He could've gone home - he _had_ gone home - until it became all too obvious that his father no longer wanted him and his mother no longer knew what he needed. Janey has no home to go to but a constantly shifting warren of warehouses and drug houses. She keeps herself useful to the Reds, running and hustling; being their pet biotic has its advantages. Kaidan keeps himself just useful enough to follow her, useful enough to get a fix of red sand here and there as payment for the "work" that the drug helps him forget.

Sometimes when he closes his eyes he dreams of the future he'd imagined for himself a long time ago, when he was just a little kid playing with toy ships. More often, he dreams of Brain Camp. Most often, the days pass in a cold gray haze and he dreams of nothing at all.

Janey's fingers teasing over his flesh pull him out of his stupor. His head pounds, low and loud. The sand has worn off, and the kind of analgesics Vyrnnus sometimes offered as a reward for complying with his impossible demands against all odds are only a memory now.

He tries to remember how long it's been since he's seen her, what he'd been doing before the powder fell through his hands and into his nose, his blood, his brain. Only a couple of days, he thinks. He's used to her not being around all the time; he's used to her leaving especially when he's high. Like all of the slingers, Janey won't touch the stuff, and looks down on him for needing it, although she won't admit it. The same way he won't admit the way he feels when she disappears with Marlo.

He remembers the creaking mattress and choked back whimpers and her weight atop his body suddenly makes him sick. He pushes at her, feeling trapped. Janey doesn't seem to notice. She shifts slightly. Her legs straddle his waist, and she trails her hand lightly along the curve of his neck. Her naked breasts sway just slightly as she breathes in and out. Her easy confidence only increases the nausea churning in the pit of his stomach.

"You've never done this before, have you?" she laughs.

He shakes his head, a red heat flushing through his skin. He bites his lip and refuses to meet her eyes, embarrassed and nervous. Like he _needed _another reminder of his naivety and inadequacy compared to her.

"I don't, we don't..." He squeezes his eyes shut. _Breathe, Alenko_, he orders himself. As Janey pushes him down onto the tattered and stained camp bed, he rolls out from under her.

"Hey," she says sharply, grabbing his hand and pulling him back. "I _want to_, idiot," she insists. Her hands are cold, their touch against his bare skin raises goosebumps, and he shivers without bothering to stop himself. "It's different with you."

_How different?_ he wonders. "Did you ever... you know... _want to_... with someone else?"

He feels the way she freezes up in his arms, pulling away just slightly, muscles tight with buzzing tension, and he immediately curses himself for asking the question. What makes him think it's any of his fucking business anyway?

Janey settles back on her knees at the end of the mattress and flicks a glance in his direction that lasts less than a second but burns right through him. She slowly shakes her head.

The gesture is enough for Kaidan to release the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Janey grabs his hand, pulling him closer to her, refusing to let him go or let him question her commitment to this, to _him_.

He lets his fingers trail down her naked skin, sliding over her hips, hiccuping over the raised scars and rough calluses of her body. They tell a hundred stories, and just one: Brain Camp was no picnic, but he does not hold a monopoly on being taken advantage of or getting a raw deal. Jane Shepard is just about to turn eighteen but acts far older; he is well into twenty-one but still acts like an uncertain kid. He runs his thumb over faded cigarette burns, badly healed knife wounds, deep punctures and jagged cuts from a childhood spent running barefoot through streets littered with rusty nails and scrap metal. At least he _has_ a family. His father might still refuse to acknowledge his existence, but his mother at least would probably open the door. Janey's last recorded address was a group home she'd slept in for a few scattered nights in the months before he'd met her; she hadn't _stayed_ anywhere that matched her listed placement for years before that. She may be owned by the Reds, but at least it's a kind of belonging.

Kaidan wraps his arm around her hip, pulls her down, realizes that he doesn't belong anywhere, except that somehow he belongs here, with her. He blows out a careful exhalation as Janey grinds against his body, her fingers tease his sensitive flesh.

"I want to too," he admits, the words tumbling from his lips before he can second-guess them.

"Yeah, I know, Kaidan."

She leads, at first, but somehow he knows what to do despite his inexperience; and at some point he takes over, thrusting into her, and she lets him. They move with a rhythm of warmth and want that surges through him with an electricity stronger than anything he's ever done with biotics. Every nerve in his body tingles. He runs his fingers through Janey's hair as she shifts and squirms in response to the pressure of his touch. Her hand grabs the back of his neck and she draws him down into a kiss that turns sharp as she nibbles at his lip, and through the blood that doesn't hurt he tastes salt and sweat and a color that washes out the gray of the warehouse and his life in general.

His blood roars in his ears like the pounding surf of the ocean he'd grown up hearing, pulling him under. He drowns in her, and it's like breathing for the first time in _years_.

Kaidan can feel the rise and fall of every breath Janey takes, entangled in his arms. He smiles, tracing his finger lightly down her arm as she sleeps. He rolls over onto his back, one arm still wrapped around her. Her hair seems longer than he'd imagined, splayed out over his chest. He can feel the warmth of every puff of air she exhales against his bare skin. She murmurs and shifts in her sleep, nuzzling closer to him, then rolling onto her side and curling into a tight ball. He gently pulls away, and watches her, feeling more content than he can ever remember feeling.

In the daylight hours they pretend like nothing has changed between them. Janey slips a gun into a concealed holster and Kaidan keeps an eye on the corner, calling out coded warnings that are mostly unnecessary: they've all gained a sense for when a cop is rolling up. That night, with the product and the profit all in the hands of the Reds' "lieutenants," with nothing to show for her hours of hustling on the street, Janey stretches out on the stoop of a crumbling and boarded up rowhouse, and stares across a wide expanse of concrete to the one flickering fluorescent light that hasn't yet been shot out of the pre-fab office set up there.

"You know what kind of money they're giving to freaks like us?" she asks, nodding at the building. The large recruitment posters have long since been ripped apart and sprayed over with tags, but Kaidan can still recognize the logo of the Earth Systems Alliance.

He nods, slowly. Her eighteenth birthday (April 11th - she knows it, along with her full birth name, only because she's seen it written on so many government files and courtroom records), is only two days away. The biotic enlistment bonus is more cash in one shot than she's likely had in her entire life: a guaranteed ticket off-world, away from the dead-end life of the streets. She's already a soldier, she'll die young either way... at least this way, she can do it with some respectability and honor. Someone else might see her the way he does.

But he can't bring himself to join her in signing his life away to the Alliance military. Everything he knows about the Alliance is contained in a darkened upstairs bedroom, with medals hidden in the locked drawer of a desk (his father drinking until the bottle was empty on Armistice Day, although he hadn't fought, not in that war), combined with nightmares of Jump Zero.

"You stay in this pit if you want to," she demands, as she stuffs the very few remnants of daily living she can claim as possessions into a tattered pawn-shop duffle bag. "I won't."

Kaidan knows he won't win this argument with her, he can't win _any _argument with her. "I'm not stopping you," he tells her, already conscious of the distance between them, the severance of whatever relationship they have. It wasn't really any relationship at all, he knows that. Just two ships passing in the night, any port in a storm.

He takes her to the beach in the last hours before she ships out. The waves crash over their bare feet as the sun rises, frigid to the point of insanity, but she'd dragged him in, laughing.

"I don't want to forget what water feels like, Kaidan," she insists.

"In three years, I've never seen you go to the beach," he counters.

Janey shrugs. "Don't know what you've got til it's gone, right?"

The words echo in his head for long hours after he watches the Alliance spaceport empty out: her shuttle only one of many that disappear from atmo, indistinguishable shooting stars fading away.


End file.
